ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the educator's interpersonal attitudes and the learners' mental attitudes that prelude to knowledge construction as two collections of empirically observable indexes. It aims at studying how the interpersonal attitudes of teachers may influence learning in adult classrooms. The chapter looks at semi-structured interviews with individual teachers, aims at discovering how they manage interactions in the classroom with reference to the goal of fostering learning. Learning is the transformational process whereby an individual, to a variable degree of deliberation, constructs new knowledge. There are two facets to any act of communication, respectively relevant to the contents and to the relation between the interlocutors. Correlation analysis showed covariance of the educators' interpersonal attitudes and the learners' levels of attention, participation and understanding. Adult learners need to feel involved as active participants during the entire learning process and able to negotiate the relevant decisions with the rest of the group and with the educator.
